Abstract: Deep brain stimulation (DBS) offers hope for people with severe, chronic depression who do not respond to conventional treatment. Although there has been much progress in the development of DBS, there have been some setbacks and important considerations remain for those working in this field around the benefit-risk balance. Research, therefore, must continue. Professor Helen Mayberg will talk about how DBS got started and why, and the push for commercialization by industry. She will discuss the how the needs of the patient and the risks of no treatment options are balanced by the need for care in design and use of new technologies.

Speaker: Helen Mayberg, MD

Bio:

Helen Mayberg, MD is Professor of Neurology, Neurosurgery, Psychiatry and Neuroscience, and the Mount Sinai Professor in Neurotherapeutics at the Icahn School of Medicine.  Known for studies of brain circuits in depression and for her pioneering deep brain stimulation research, Dr. Mayberg moved in 2018 from Emory University in Atlanta to Mount Sinai in New York as the Founding Director of the Center for Advanced Circuit Therapeutics. Over her career in the United States and Canada, her teams have worked to combine cutting-edge imaging strategies, quantitative behavioral metrics, and rigorous clinical trials to define brain-based biomarkers that will optimize treatment selection for individual patients with depression.  Extending this theme, her new Center at Mt Sinai will provide an integrated platform to catalyze collaborative translational research, bringing together clinicians from neurology, neurosurgery, psychiatry and psychology and experts from neuroscience, imaging, engineering, and computational modeling within a unique, shared ecosystem and a common mission to advance precision surgical treatments for patients with complex neuropsychiatric disorders. 

Dr. Mayberg trained in Neurology at Columbia’s Neurological Institute in New York, followed by a research fellowship in nuclear medicine at Johns Hopkins. She is a member of the National Academy of Medicine, The American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Inventors, among other honors, and participates in a wide variety of scientific and advisory activities across multiple fields in neuroscience.  

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